Michael A. De Leon is a graphic designer by day, but wears many hats in his off time. In 2004, after several years of covering the Spurs, he started Project Spurs, a Spurs team fansite as an outlet to provide content to Spurs fans, while continuing to write for himself and learning the ins and outs of online publishing and web design. He has since built a writing team and started a popular weekly Spurs podcast called the Spurscast.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

The Road to 700

Gregg Popovich would have you believe winning 700 career games isn’t even worthy of this article. He said as much after the Spurs narrowly beat the Indiana Pacers on Saturday night 100-99.

“It doesn’t mean anything, other than that one has been in one place for a while and one has had good players, and so the wins come,” Popovich said. “That’s all it means. That’s the truth.”

I rarely disagree with Pop on anything, aside from starting Matt Bonner, but I’ve got to disagree with him on this one.

700 career wins isn’t something that comes around very often, and in fact only 16 coaches in NBA history have reached that milestone.

Only six other active coaches hold that distinction, and aside from Don Nelson, I consider them to be the elite among NBA coaches: Larry Brown, Phil Jackson, Jerry Sloan, George Karl, Rick Adelman and Nelson.

Pop was Brown’s understudy in San Antonio and he has said he idolized Jerry Sloan, but to be in the same class with them is completely different. But there’s no doubt he deserves it, with a .673 winning percentage, a coach of the year award and four NBA Championships on his resume.

Taking a look back though, it’s interesting to think about where he started and where he is now.